How To Backup ALL Your Smartphone Photos FOR FREE

How To Backup Your Smartphone Photos & Video FOR FREE

While I love my DSLR camera, traveling over the past few years I have realized that the majority of the photos I take are now on my iPhone…

My guess is that I am not the only one who does this, so if you are anything like me then your smartphone’s storage probably fills up pretty quickly.

While there are a ton of different cloud storage options like iCloud, Dropbox, etc to backup your smartphone, most of them cost money once you fill up the free space.

I’ve also thought about just saving all my photos to an external hard drive but if something ever happened to the hard drive, all my photos would be lost!

After a little research, I came across quite an awesome workaround to this problem.

Enter Google+

If you aren’t familiar with Google+, don’t worry you aren’t the only one ; )

Basically it was Google’s failed attempt to create a Facebook clone that no one really uses anymore.

That being said, there is one AMAZING benefit of Google+ and that is FREE PHOTO & VIDEO STORAGE!

Normally Google accounts like Gmail, Google Drive, etc only come with 15gb free storage but in an attempt to seed Google+ with content and push people to use it on mobile , Google+ automatically uploads your smartphone photos to Google+ whenever the app is open and it DOES NOT COUNT against the free 15gb they give you.

Google+ also has Android, mobile browser, and desktop applications. On any of the platforms (including desktop), as long as your photos aren’t larger than 2048px and videos are less than 15 minutes long, you can back them up for free!!

I didn’t know they had a desktop app but now I am definitely going to backup all my DSLR photos to Google, just as a precaution.

“Google+ Web”

One thing to remember before backing up your photos is to set your Google+ privacy setting to private. Once you do that, you basically have a free unlimited private photo repository.

As long as you open the Google+ app every few weeks and let it automatically upload your photos (like when you are about to sleep), your entire smartphone photo and video collection will be backed up for free.

It doesn’t get much better than that!

If you are interested in more information about Google+ and this awesome feature, check out the full LifeHacker article or the Google+ official post about it here.

It is under Auto Backup settings in the app. Mine has been on Full Size but as long as photos are under 2048px it doesn’t count towards your 15gb. I’d suggest uploading a few photos and seeing if your storage space goes down to make sure it isn’t “charging” you.

Thanks for sharing this, it’s especially useful for when you go on trips that you don’t want to bring your laptop. 🙂

I like the idea that its a good repository for backup, but I wonder how easy it is to download those images? If getting it onto your computer is difficult, then it seems to have only solved part of the problem.